This week, we learn how to model and texture a classic Fiat 500 car in open source software including Blender and Gimp.

Introduction

The old Fiat 500 is one of the most famous Italian cars in the world. This tutorial is dedicated to all people who love beautiful cars and especially the Italian style.

For this work, we will only use the open source softwares Blender, Gimp and Inkscape - you can freely download all of these programs from their respective websites.

The first thing to do when you decide to model a car is to look for some good reference images (front, rear, side and top view). Fortunately you can easily find tons of pictures of the old 500 online.

Open the images with Gimp, cut them to the same size and use them as a background in the Blender viewport (see my Vespa tutorial for details). Now we'll start with the modeling!

Step 1: Modeling the Body (1)

Open Blender and use the image reference as the background (don't forget to change the view mode in orthographic numpad 5).

Delete the default cube and from the top view (numpad 7), add a plane (Shift + A > Plane). Jump into Edit mode (Tab key), delete the left side of the plane and add a Mirror modifier (we'll only work on one side of the car) and Subsurface.

Now extrude the vertex (E) and follow the main lines of the model. Try to maintain the same distance between them and don't use more vertices than needed!

Continue to model the body by extruding the vertices and moving them. Enable MatCap display (N > Display > MatCap) to check if there are artifacts on the model.

(ID: 312656, pid: 0) Martin Baker on Sat, 06 December 2014 3:31pm Very fine job: excellent model, absolutely beautiful renders. But you are modeling at the edit/vertices level, are you not? The solid object level images are the result of the subsurf modifier added to the model, correct? At any rate, good tut and again perfect result.